In response to this post on the notorious Kansas murder/kidnapping, a reader writes:
I think you’re off-base on your harrumphing over the press’s language in this fetus case . . . It’s far less complicated (or inconsistent) then you make it out to be. It was a fetus until the moment this bastard ripped it out of its dead mother’s womb. At that point, it became a baby. Similarly, if a pregnant woman gives birth conventionally, her fetus turns into a baby the moment it slides through the birth canal. So it is accurate to write about the theft of the fetus, but the discovery of the baby. I don’t think abortion politics really has to play into it, it’s just a matter of precise language.
It’s true that the absurd sentence that Rich Lowry cites — in which the woman is described as “cutting out the fetus and taking the baby back to Kansas” — is technically correct under this rule. (Headlines that trumpeted a search for a “missing fetus,” on the other hand, seem more dubious.) But the larger point is that the “precise language” is itself absurd, because it treats a shift in location (from womb to outside world) as though it were a developmental distinction. “Her fetus turns into a baby the moment it slides through the birth canal,” my correspondent writes. By what magic, exactly, is this “turn” achieved? Obviously, the English language is filled with small absurdities, and the strange “baby-fetus” distinction (which is hardly universally hewed to, I might add) wouldn’t matter much — except that as a matter of law, one can kill a “fetus,” whereas a “baby” is deemed worthy of legal protection. So when a case comes up that highlights the absurdity of this distinction, the press’s difficulties in describing the fetus/baby/unborn child/clump of cells has everything to do with abortion politics – even if reporters themselves don’t know it.
– Ross
The Dish 